Recap: There’s always death in the air in ‘Twin Peaks, Part 15’

Wendy Robie is on a mission in Part 15 of David Lynch's and Mark Frost's "Twin Peaks, The Return: Part 15."

Wendy Robie is on a mission in Part 15 of David Lynch's and Mark Frost's "Twin Peaks, The Return: Part 15."

Photo: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME

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Alicia Witt and Caleb Landry Jones in a scene from "Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 15."

Alicia Witt and Caleb Landry Jones in a scene from "Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 15."

Photo: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME

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Naomi Watts and Kyle MacLachlan in a scene from "Twin Peaks, The Return: Part 15."

Naomi Watts and Kyle MacLachlan in a scene from "Twin Peaks, The Return: Part 15."

Photo: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME

Recap: There’s always death in the air in ‘Twin Peaks, Part 15’

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As we near the end of “Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 15” offers the most poignant meal of melancholy yet. David Lynch and Mark Frost are preparing a massive finale (on what scale? we can’t guess), with the plot threads, Lynchian history and experimental quirks of “The Return” joining in steel clarity. But as everything falls into place, Lynch and Frost are still bleakly hell-bent on reminding us that “Twin Peaks” has an expiration date. The alternate title/tagline of “Part 15” is most telling: “There’s some fear in letting go.”

Indeed, “Part 15” is littered with more deaths than Peakies are prepared for: spiritual (Audrey Horne, Gersten Hayward) and actual (David Bowie, Catherine Coulson). In two weeks, a vast community will bid farewell to this town forever, and the creeping void that the show will leave behind is starting to form. This summer, Lynch and Frost have shown that “Twin Peaks: The Return” is not about returns, but absences, delays, windups, and deaths—sudden, pathetic and inevitable—all of an aptly tragic nature. Aside from it being the most formally playful hour of TV now, it’s also the least assuaging or comforting.

The beauty of a show like “Twin Peaks,” as Willow Maclay succinctly pointed out last night, is how many types of interpretation it allows. For the past few weeks in my write-ups, I’ve steered clear of sweeping predictions and attempts to crack Season 3’s cryptic code. I’ve been more interested in what kinds of sensations or emotions the elements in Lynch’s world conjure up—and, from there, linking it to moments in Lynch’s oeuvre and in the larger history of TV or film. (He draws mostly from American films, but the experimental narratives of the French New Wave director Jacques Rivette creep in every now and then.) Tonight’s episode paid that approach off well.

Your intense emotional response is based on a few types of knowledge. There’s knowing Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Blvd.” with William Holden and Gloria Swanson, the film-about-films that causes Dougie Jones to snap into Agent Cooper-esque action, as Cecil B. DeMille utters the name “Gordon Cole”—a name Cooper suddenly seems to remember.

There’s knowing Lynch’s oeuvre, and realizing that Lynchian cinema is spiritually linked to “Sunset Blvd.” In both Wilder’s film and Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr.,” the clear-eyed, non-gussy look is at odds with the grotesque, writhing, wilting subject. With Wilder, the subject is Swanson’s Norma Desmond, who is both hopelessly passé and frighteningly modern. With Lynch, it’s the two women (Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring) who lose their stable sense of identity, much like Cooper and Laura Palmer are losing theirs.

There’s the most important prerequisite of all: knowing your Twin Peaks history (“Fire Walk with Me,” “The Missing Pieces,” “The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer,” etc.). You perked up when you saw the Jumping Man with the clay-mask inside the Convenience Store. And you cried bitterly when Hawk announced the death of the Log Lady (MVP Coulson) in a devastating long-shot of the only few sane and/or unchanged “Twin Peaks” characters left. It’s a haunting, mortal moment: Lucy singled out in a beam of bright white light, while Bobby, Andy, and Frère Truman look down in despair at a piece of “TP” history gone to the grave. We’re next, they silently realize. The situation is made even graver when you realize that this was indeed Coulson’s last appearance; she was the first major cast-member to die who had already filmed her parts (Warren Frost and Miguel Ferrer followed suit). Her ghostly presence throughout the new season has been leading up to this unexpected, heady combination of the story world and “real life.” In the original Twin Peaks, the Log Lady’s defining prop was her namesake, the log; in “The Return,” it’s her breathing tube.

“The Return” is not for the casual viewer. Despite the fact that Rivette saw “Fire Walk With Me” without having seen the original series and fell in love with Lynch’s crazed imagination anyway, I wouldn’t recommend that course of action to anyone eager to see “Twin Peaks: The Return.” So much of its success for the individual viewer is dependent upon them knowing the canon (previous episodes, movies, and deleted scenes)—and how willing the new viewer is to let the canon be twisted.

What could be crueller to a Peakie—and more appropriate for today—than Lynch’s and Frost’s 2017 treatment of the original series’ spunky girl-teens? Donna is nowhere to be seen. Audrey Horne’s husband Charlie continues his gaslighting act by passive-aggressively agreeing, then refusing, to go to the Roadhouse with her. This bit we’ve sort of gotten used to—but I’m far more saddened by the new storyline involving Donna Hayward’s youngest sister, Gersten (Alicia Witt). She’s on a crash-course to misery with her affair with Becky’s husband Steven. As they start off-puttingly munching each other’s cheek in a claustrophobic two-shot, Steven details (in graphic, expletive-laden detail) how much he enjoyed the sex he and Gersten had. This is a TMI far cry from the sweet, cleanly kooky Gersten we remember from Season 2, Episode 1: The gal who played a mean piano boogie-woogie, in a pink ballerina’s dress and silver tiara.

Later, Steven shoots himself in the forest as a man (Mark Frost himself) comes upon the two lovers. Gersten looks up to high heaven for some sort of answer—but she gets no response. It seems excessive, but it fits with Lynch’s increasingly melancholic and corrupted vision of American society. (Certain Nadine lines—“To me, [Dr. Amp] isn’t the only one around here, tellin’ it like it is…!”—carry a Trumpian, crazed alt-news bent.) Not even Lynch’s quasi-ironic love of Americana can be deployed with oddball warmth anymore; to match the times, Lynch’s new “TP” world is relentlessly arch and callous.

The moments where we get a return to ‘90/’91 “Twin Peaks” gooeyness are the opiate-like antithesis to his misanthropic 2017 thesis. This plays out most clearly in that wonderful Big Ed/Norma scene at the Double R Diner. It’s a series of mystical ups and downs, so riveting (Rivette-ing?) that you can’t keep up with the flux-like changes in tone:

Up: Nadine allows Big Ed to marry Norma; she is going to “dig herself out of the sh-t”, following the advice of Dr. Amp/Jacoby, and bow out of a 25-year love triangle.

Unsteady middle-ground: as Lynch makes a grumbly Lynchian soundscape out of one of Redding’s vowels hanging in the air, Walter and Norma debate whether or not to turn her store into a franchise.

Lynch brilliantly cuts back and forth between these elements: Big Ed in a meditative, agitated state, wondering if he should just kill himself now; Norma, firmly telling Walter “no” to his plans for soulless corporatization. Redding’s song moves us along—and, with a slight trace of Peggy Lipton’s hand across Everett McGill’s back, we are given a moment all too rare in “Twin Peaks,” new or old: A reconciliation between two lovers, meant to be together. The cherry on top of all this is the cut to a mountain and a wispy-cloudy blue sky as Redding’s song plays to its natural conclusion. Lynch guides us to the powerhouse of Otis. A seminal moment in modern pop history accompanies a seminal moment in “Twin Peaks” history.

But even here, death hangs over the scene, waiting silently in the sidelines. There’s a backstory buried underneath “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”: Only six months after Redding’s June 1967 gig at Monterey, he would drown in a plane crash in a Wisconsin lake at the age of 26. Whether overt or subtle, sudden or slowly-drawn-out, death is the fulcrum of Lynch’s new nightmarish world. There’s the physical death of canonical characters like Philip Jeffries (David Bowie), who ends up as a teapot behind the fabled Convenience Store. His disembodied voice is not Bowie’s but a Bowie-voice-imitator (Nathan Frizzell doing Bowie doing a Southern accent). The body and voice is gone, yet we are still asked to recognize Bowie’s Jeffries as Bowie’s Jeffries. It seems perverse, but it’s in line with Lynch’s plaguing interest in what happens after the body stops to function. (To quote the Log Lady: “You know about death. That it’s just a change. Not an end.”)

What happens the moment one dies? A few seconds of clarity where life finally makes sense? Perhaps this is what Dougie Jones experiences in his “Sunset Blvd.” epiphany. After a season of casino jackpots, cherry pies in boxes, and flags, it takes one more American icon (the cynically romantic Billy Wilder) to guide Dougie to his final destination: The power-outlet which birthed him. Dougie gains consciousness, not just as Dale Cooper, but more abstractly as a human being. When he pokes a fork into the outlet and shocks himself to the sound of Janey-E’s horrified screams, we really feel the sting of life being violently snuffed out by random, hilarious, sudden death (with or without spikes). It’s a similar cliffhanger to when Audrey and Pete Horne’s fates were left hanging after the season 2 finale’s bank explosion.

It doesn’t really matter if Cooper turns out alive in the next episode, since this powerful moment can exist outside a narrative. Here we have a deft and quick exploration of the death-immediately-after-life state. It’s the mystery that none of us can ever know, bigger than “Who killed Laura Palmer?” And isn’t that what “Twin Peaks” has always been “about”? Mysteries without end? Endlessly repeating questions?

Margaret Lanterman says that her log is turning gold; and as Robert Frost wrote, nothing gold can stay.